Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF's bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking. Computational thinking is defined comprehensively to encompass computational concepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. Applied in challenging science and engineering research and education contexts, computational thinking promises a profound impact on the Nation's ability to generate and apply new knowledge. Collectively, CDI research outcomes are expected to produce paradigm shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that create new wealth and enhance the national quality of life.

CDI seeks ambitious, transformative, multidisciplinary research proposals within or across the following three thematic areas:

From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data;

Building Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by bringing people and resources together across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries.

With an emphasis on bold multidisciplinary activities that, through computational thinking, promise radical, paradigm-changing research findings, CDI is unique within NSF. Accordingly, investigators are encouraged to come together in the development of far-reaching, high-risk science and engineering research and education agendas that capitalize on innovations in, and/or innovative use of, computational thinking. CDI projects are expected to build upon productive intellectual partnerships involving investigators from academe, industry and/or other types of organizations, including international entities.

Sirin Tekinay is Program Director in the Division of Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) at the National Science Foundation. . She is on leave from a faculty position at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology. Before joining the academia, she worked at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and NORTEL. Sirin received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from George Mason University in 1994. She holds MS (1991) and BS (1989) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is on the editorial boards of the IEEE Communications Magazine, and the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. She is a senior member of the IEEE.